Piranha (Oregon Files 10)

He hung up.

Bazin was about to turn and head for the tunnel when he realized that Kensit hadn’t been able to watch what was happening in the battle between the Ratel and the PIG.

He looked out the window with dawning horror. The PIG was close enough now for him to make out the faces of the men and he noticed two things at once: the driver of the PIG had a bullet hole through his forehead and the man on top of the vehicle shouting in Creole was not one of his men. It had to be Franklin Lincoln.

He raised his radio to tell his forces to open fire, but it was too late. A rocket shot from the side of the PIG and hit the last Ratel, blowing it to pieces and his men around it to the ground.

Bazin heard Lincoln yelling for the hostages to get down. They dived to the ground as one and the machine gun behind the PIG’s fake bumper chewed through the mercenaries like a meat grinder. Eddie Seng joined Lincoln on the roof of the PIG and added his firepower to the assault. Two more of his men fell to sniper fire. The rest scattered for cover. It was only a matter of time before they were defeated.

Bazin was furious that Kensit couldn’t keep his precious machine running properly during the time when they needed it most. He knew a technical glitch in such a complicated device was inevitable. His only choice now was to get in to Sentinel, set the self-destruct, and escape in the speedboat he had stashed in one of the outbuildings along the water. Although he never expected the cement plant to fall, he always planned for the worst, so he also had a hidden SUV waiting for him on the other side of the lake.

As for his mercenaries, with the money he was pulling in from the drug lords, he could always hire more. And when Sentinel 2 was up and running, he could buy as many of them as he wanted. Haiti would still be his.

But he couldn’t let them capture Sentinel 1 intact. Kensit had been clever to build in a self-destruct that was more than simply an explosive to obliterate the equipment. Equipment was replaceable. It was the Oz cave, with its unique natural properties, that was the real treasure. Someone could eventually clear it out and build a replica of Sentinel.

Kensit had rigged Sentinel itself to prevent t

hat from happening. The device used a five-pound cobalt 60 core scavenged from used medical equipment to focus the neutrinos. The cave itself was slightly radioactive now, but nothing hazardous. However, detonating the core inside the cave would make the interior dangerously radioactive for generations. It would be impossible to build another neutrino telescope inside it.

As the battle raged outside, Bazin picked up an RPG from the weapons stockpile in case the Corporation helicopter tried to chase him across the lake. Armed with an Uzi submachine gun, he took off into the tunnel toward the Oz cave to start the sequence that would destroy Sentinel 1 forever.

The two techs had played dumb, responding to Juan’s questions in Russian, but he shocked them when he asked them fluently in their native tongue where Kensit was. He was also very eloquent about what would happen to them if they didn’t cooperate. Their bravery exhausted, the techs switched to English and told him that Kensit was on a yacht where he was monitoring the feed from the neutrino telescope that he had named Sentinel.

One of the screens on the control panel was slaved to the view that Kensit had from his remote location. Juan had been amazed to see it switch from a close-up of Linda to a shot of the PIG as it raced toward a Ratel armored vehicle.

Juan’s first instructed them to deactivate the view altogether. Without it, his crew had a fighting chance at whatever they were attempting. The screen abruptly went dark, surely causing Kensit to go apoplectic. A phone on the console rang insistently, but he told the Russians to ignore it.

Then Juan had a better idea.

“Do you know how this thing works?” he asked them. When they hesitated, he and Trono pointed the barrel of their MP-5s in the techs’ faces.

“We can operate it,” one of the techs said, “but that’s all.”

“Do you know Kensit’s location?”

He quickly nodded and pointed at a monitor showing the latitude and longitude. “That’s where the signal is being beamed to,” the tech said.

“Time for a demo,” Juan said. “Show me Kensit’s cozy little hideaway.”

The tech nodded and eased over to the console, where he nervously manipulated the controls until a new image came up on the screen. It was an overhead view of a white hundred-foot yacht lazily cruising an azure sea. The image zoomed down as if it were a kamikaze dive bomber. The virtual camera plunged through the deck until it stopped in a room with a console that looked identical to the one in the cave.

“Pan around,” Juan said. “Get a shot of this, Mike.”

Trono held up his phone to video what they were watching.

The place was a sty, with empty cans and plates of food littering the floor. On the wall there was a map of Mexico with a pin stuck into a spot on the Yucatán Peninsula marked “Phase 2” in a sloppy scrawl. Papers with jotted equations and notes were strewn across the desk. A journal lay on the end of it. Gunther Lutzen’s name was penned in neat letters on the cover.

The camera kept moving until it settled on Kensit himself. He stared wide-eyed directly at the screen as if he could see them.

But he couldn’t see them. Kensit was monitoring the view from Sentinel, so he was actually seeing himself on his own screen. His mouth began to move.

“Turn up the volume,” Juan said.

The tech adjusted the sound and they heard Kensit’s reedy voice: “. . . couldn’t have gotten in there. If it’s you, Cabrillo, I want you to know you’re too late. If you survive the rest of the day, which I doubt, you’ll see what little impact all of your efforts have made. Now it’s time to say good-bye.”

The screen went blank.

“What happened? Get it back!” Juan demanded.